Hacker News Reader

Comment by tempaccount1234 | Hacker News Reader

I didn‘t „get“ Jupyter the first time it used it. A year later it clicked. A Notebook keeps state while you write it. This is different from IDEs, where programs lose state while you are writing code. Now I use it all the time - next to an open IDE, as a playground to quickly test ideas and algorithms.

View on HN

I also use it in tandem with my IDE day to day as a data engineer, for basically the same reasons. I really like being able to interactively explore and transform a dataframe while developing new pipelines, or debugging existing ones (all of which are implemented as modules in a Python package, not as Notebooks).

This is critically important when one step of your analysis takes 10+ minutes to run. You want to be able to explore the output and not worry about rerunning all the calculations like a file/IDE based tool would.

Reactive notebooks are nice but I’ve accidentally reran slow SQL queries because I updated an upstream cell and that’s painful (using Pluto, ObservableHQ, and HexComputing).

In practice I never see or create notebooks that don’t run when you push the run-all button, it’s a well understood and easily avoidable issue. It’s probably a local optimum but I’m happy with them.

IDEs can 100% do this, too. The art of connecting to a running program using the debugger is just something folks stopped caring about.

This led a lot of programming environments to where batch loading of the code is basically required. But "image based" workflows are a very old concept and work great with practice. Some older languages were based on this idea. (Smalltalk being the main one that pushed this way. Common Lisp also has good support for interacting with the running system.)

It is a shame, as many folks assume everything has to be "repl" driven, when that is only a part of what made image based workflows work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com